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Defense Secretary Ashton B. Carter’s statement last week that America is ready to provide attack helicopters and field advisers to help the Iraqi government free Ramadi from control of the Islamic State group is astonishing.

Racial diversity is essential in carrying out the missions of institutions like universities, corporations and the United States military. Affirmative action is one tool that’s useful in achieving that diversity. Some Supreme Court justices, however, seem unable to accept this fact, despite decades of experience and evidence showing its value.

All decent people feel sorrow and righteous fury about the latest slaughter of innocents, in California. Law enforcement and intelligence agencies are searching for motivations, including the vital question of how the murderers might have been connected to international terrorism. That is right and proper.

It is a measure of how cold the West’s relations with Russia have become that NATO’s membership invitation to Montenegro — a small, poor Balkan state with a military force of 2,000 and no strategic significance save putting the last bit of Europe’s Mediterranean coastline under the alliance — would provoke furious cries of “provocation” and “encirclement” from the Kremlin.

A report by the Government Accountability Office on the nation’s $1 billion germ warfare defense network does not inspire confidence. The network of air samplers called BioWatch in cities across the country is supposed to differentiate between harmless germs and lethal pathogens that could be unleashed by terrorists.

It has been about one month since congressional Republicans caved in on the national debt limit and approved a two-year budget, which conveniently suspended the debt limit until March 2017, just after the 2016 elections — and the spending floodgates have already opened up. In just those few weeks, spending has surged by nearly $600 billion, raising the official national debt to more than $18.7 trillion.

The headlines are alarming: Murder is up around the country, caused by anything from more guns to a heroin epidemic to the so-called “Ferguson Effect” — the disputed idea that police officers have become less aggressive out of fear that their actions will be recorded by civilians and criticized after the fact.

Congress could approve a six-year transportation bill by the end of this week, when authorization for federal transportation programs expires. Unfortunately, the legislation will not do nearly enough to improve aging bridges, fix highways or expand the capacity of mass transit and rail systems. Worse, it could make traveling on American roads and railways less safe.

Of all the reactions to Friday’s terrorist attacks in Paris, some U.S. politicians’ objections to resettling Syrian refugees may be the most irrational. President Barack Obama has pledged to let in 10,000 people fleeing the carnage in Syria, but governors of at least two dozen states now say they won’t accept any. Presidential candidate Ted Cruz wants to admit only Christians.

In the bombing campaign in Syria against the Islamic State group, the United States has been more or less left on its own; at the same time, international attempts to end the conflict may be moving forward.

Professional sports teams have collected more than $53 million from the Department of Defense for patriotic displays that cheer the U.S. military. Two U.S. senators who authored a report on the practice decry it as unnecessary and wasteful “paid patriotism.”

The European Parliament has urged its member states to embrace American fugitive Edward Snowden as a “whistle-blower and international human rights defender.” The former National Security Agency contractor remains in Russia, and the Justice Department has ignored his public entreaties for a plea deal that would allow him to return to the United States and face charges.